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A crucial Election Commission order on Bihar’s 2003 voter list revision has mysteriously vanished. Discover how a missing document triggered 20+ years of legal and political storm in the state
In 2003, the Election Commission of India carried out an intensive revision of the voter list in Bihar.
In such an exercise, the voter list is created from scratch, with a door-to-door verification of all households in the state. This is in addition to the year-round checks of the roll carried out by the Election Commission, by inviting claims and objections from the public.
This list, created 22 years ago, is the basis on which the poll body has embarked on a “special intensive revision” of the state’s electoral roll.
Those featured on this 2003 list qualify for inclusion in the revised electoral roll without having to prove their citizenship – a condition that voters who have been added to the roll after 2003 will have to meet.
By the Election Commission’s own estimate, the number of such voters is a staggering 2.93 crore.
Others estimate that this figure could be as high as 4.76 crore.
The ongoing exercise has sparked widespread concerns of disenfranchisement, especially of poor and marginalised voters, who are struggling to produce documents to prove their citizenship.
It has also raised questions about whether the Election Commission is introducing a new standard that it did not apply to previous voter list revisions in Bihar.
But more than two weeks after the election commission launched the special intensive revision, the poll body’s order – or instruction – on the 2003 revision is not in the public domain.
Like the 2025 order and others before it, the 2003 instruction would have stated the reason for that revision, how it was carried out and would have mentioned a timeline. It could answer several crucial questions: did the poll body demand proof of citizenship during the 2003 revision? Was it also done within a span of three months? What was the reason for it?
An election commission official in Delhi told Scroll that they have had difficulty tracing the 2003 instruction in the body’s records and do not expect to find it over the next “10-15 days”.
“I haven’t seen [the 2003 order] on our website,” said the official. “The relevant section has been asked to look for it. There was no digitalisation in those times. It must be lying somewhere.”
A former senior commission official told Scroll that he has not been able to obtain a copy either. Leaders of the Opposition INDIA alliance in Bihar, including Manoj Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Krishna Allavaru, the Congress party Bihar in-charge, said they do not have a copy. Nor do the activists who have moved the Supreme Court against the 2025 revision.
A compilation of instructions on voter lists once available on the commission’s website is also missing.
Scroll obtained a copy of two instructions by the commisssion from 2004 that had ordered intensive revision of voter lists in five northeastern states and in Jammu and Kashmir.
The instructions show that these revisions were carried out over six months and did not ask all voters to prove their citizenship – either by referring to a decades-old voter list or demanding additional documents.
In 2003, the Election Commission had held intensive revisions of voters lists in seven states: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
The chief election commissioner in 2003, JM Lyngdoh, told The Times of India that these revisions were done because “for a long time, we have not been happy with the state of the [voter] rolls”, which had a “lot of missing names” and “omissions”.
The report said that Lyngdoh had noted how “recent surveys had resulted in entire streets and blocks being deleted, seemingly under political influence on the enumerators” – government officials who maintain voter lists at the local level.
Scroll contacted election officials who oversaw the 2003 revision of voter rolls in Bihar to check whether that exercise asked for citizenship proof.
Lyngdoh said that he could not recall details of the 2003 revision and did not wish to jog his memory. “I have lost all interest in elections,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t remember anything about it.”
TS Krishnamurthy, one of the two election commissioners, during the 2003 revision, could not recall details either. “I am not able to recollect and I am not in a position to answer,” he said. “You should ask the public relations officer at ECI.”
NS Madhavan was the chief electoral officer in Bihar during the 2003 revision.
“My memory is failing me but I don’t remember there being a demand to furnish documents to prove one’s citizenship in 2003 during the [house-to-house] enumeration,” said Madhavan. “It was during the additions [when voters had to be added to the draft roll] that one had to prove their citizenship ab initio [from the beginning].”
This procedure matches with the intensive revision that the ECI ordered in six states in 2004.
A year after revision of voter lists in 2003, the ECI announced another round of intensive revisions in five northeastern states – Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura – and in Jammu & Kashmir.
The qualifying date for these lists was January 1, 2005, that is, anyone who was 18 years old on that date was eligible to enroll as a voter.
The poll body’s instructions on the intensive revision in the northeast, seen by Scroll, show that in all five states, the exercise began with a month spared for “preparatory work”. This was scheduled between July 1, 2004, and August 1, 2004.
Then came the house-to-house enumeration between August 2 and September 3.
Between September 4 and October 28 that year, the poll body prepared the manuscript and released the draft voter lists on October 29. Over three weeks – October 29 to November 20 – were reserved for claims and objections filed by voters against the draft, and these had to be disposed by December 13.
The final voter list had to be out by January 3, 2005.
The instructions did not ask all voters in these states to prove their citizenship during the house-to-house enumeration.
The guidelines said that enumerators had to meet the head of the household and “enumerate the names of all such persons who are claimed to be adult Indian citizens and are ordinarily residents” by the head of the household in an electoral card.
The enumerator would also inform the head of the household that they cannot furnish any false information because it is an electoral offence.
The electoral cards would be checked by officials designated as “supervisors”, who would compare names entered in it with the then existing voter list. Any new entry that is not in the existing list would be marked as “new”.
Similarly, those voters who were in the existing list but not in the new manuscript would be marked as “missing voters”, who have either died or shifted.
The manuscripts would be re-checked through random house-to-house visits by the supervisor and three other election officials.
After these procedures, the electoral registration officer, or ERO, would delete the “missing voters” from the existing voter list and add the “new” voters in it. This is the draft voter list.
In the entire process, the citizenship test is only applied for two types of voters.
One, the “new” voters in areas with “substantial presence” of foreign nationals whose “linkage” to an existing voter could not be established.
In this case, the ECI instructed the ERO to “get the particulars of such persons verified” by using government agencies.
Here it lay down some checks. “In no case, any such agency, other than the concerned ERO, shall summon the persons under verification to police stations or their offices or insist for production of documents of only a specified nature,” says the instruction.
It adds that during this verification, “the status as Indian citizen of every person shall be verified” with regard to part two of the Indian Constitution dealing with citizenship, the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Foreigners Act, 1946.
The second type of voter who had to prove his citizenship is the one who applied for inclusion in the draft voter list for the first time – unlike the current exercise in Bihar, where even voters who have voted in elections over the past two decades are being asked to prove their citizenship.
“The ERO must be satisfied that the person seeking to have his name enrolled is not disqualified, among others, by reason of his not being a citizen of India,” says the instruction.
The ERO, it added, could ask such voters to produce documents like the National Register of Citizens, a citizenship certificate, a passport and a birth certificate.
“It must, however, be borne in mind that the above mentioned documents are only illustrative and not exhaustive,” said the instruction. “Any other documents having a bearing on the question of citizenship should also be entertained and evaluated.”
